Chris Powell: Esty’s hypocrisy is small

By Chris Powell

Published
12:00 am EDT, Sunday, April 8, 2018

If believing in something signifies having considered an issue deeply, most members of Congress don't believe in much of anything, since most political representation these days is just a matter of ascertaining what constituents want to hear and spewing it back at them.

So the fix in which U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-5, finds herself is not really hypocrisy -- her campaigning for protecting women in the workplace while she was coddling a chief of staff who was abusing and threatening employees and then paying him severance, writing him a letter of recommendation, and signing a nondisclosure agreement with him.

No one who really believed what she was saying, who wasn't just striking poses to exploit the troublesome character of President Trump, could have ended up where Esty is now, another national joke at Connecticut's expense.

And though Esty's fix is being perceived as hypocrisy, on the congressional scale it is small. On the congressional scale cosmic hypocrisies are perpetrated every day without even being noticed, as when congressmen responded to the recent Florida high school massacre by deploring the lack of mental health treatment after having appropriated, year after year, tens of billions of dollars for futile imperial wars. Money is never lacking for those wars, and support of such appropriations from Connecticut's congressional delegation is always strong, since much of the money is spent with military contractors based in the state.

Realizing how bad Esty looks now, some Democratic state legislators are calling for her to resign. Such calls are not coming from her colleagues in the congressional delegation and from Governor Malloy, who may be more inclined to balance righteousness against the potential consequences to the party of losing Esty's seat in a special election, from which her resignation would have removed the party's advantages of incumbency.

Being more attuned to national politics, the rest of the delegation and the governor may figure that Esty remains the party's strongest candidate in the 5th and that since she wasn't the perpetrator of the abuse in her office, just its enabler, and has apologized, women voters in her district will accept her apology and figure that no Republican is likely to be much better on issues of special concern to them.

Besides, the Republicans probably will not have the wit to nominate a woman to run against Esty.

But at least Esty and state Rep. Angel Arce, D-Hartford, who is resigning after being exposed for romancing a 16-year-old girl via internet messages a few years ago, may help cost the Democrats the personal righteousness issue in the coming campaign, especially if the Republicans publicize the many recent scandals of the Malloy administration.